Scotsman of his impudent offence. It has power to re-arrest when Parliament meets again. Accordingly, in the new session a fresh warrant for Murray’s committal was made out, and the Serjeant-at-Arms went to his house to arrest him; but he had fled, and though a reward of £500 was offered for his discovery, he was never captured. Twenty years afterwards the custom requiring prisoners to kneel at the Bar was abolished. The last prisoner to suffer this indignity was a journalist—Mr. Baldwin, the publisher of _The St. James’s Chronicle_. On March 14, 1771, he was arrested for publishing a report of the proceedings of the House, and was compelled to prostrate himself abjectly at the Bar while the Speaker scolded him for having dared to inform the electors of the doings of their representatives in Parliament. In 1772 a Standing Order was passed—inspired, as John Hatsell, the Clerk of the House, ingenuously suggests, by “the humanity of the House”—by which it was ordered that in future delinquents should receive the Speaker’s judgment standing. Perhaps the House was moved to take this action by the cutting irony of a remark made by Baldwin. On rising from his knees, after being censured, he said, as he brushed the dust from his clothes, “What a damned dirty House!” Perhaps the House preferred to allow culprits to stand at the Bar rather than run the risk, by making them kneel, of exposing its majestic self any longer to such ridicule. The peers, however, have never formally renounced this custom by Standing Order. Warren Hastings was obliged to kneel at the Bar of the House of Lords on being admitted to bail, in 1787, on his impeachment; and again, at the opening of his trial in the following year, he remained on his knees until directed to rise by the Lord Chancellor. “I can,” he afterwards wrote, half pathetically and half indignantly, “with truth affirm that I have borne with indifference all the base treatment I have had dealt to me—all except the ignominious ceremonial of kneeling before the House.” Even on being called to the Bar to hear his acquittal announced by the Lord Chancellor, eight years subsequently, he had to undergo the same humiliating ordeal. But the Lords have not for many years now required a prisoner at the Bar to kneel. 4